20 Victorian Hobbies That Gave Women More Freedom Than You’d Think

In the 1890s, cycling became increasingly popular with women. To deter women from wanting to ride the new safety bicycle, which was cheaper and more practical than many earlier tricycles, conservative critics and doctors invented a medical disorder called “bicycle face.” This disorder supposedly permanently distorted women’s features. Undeterred, women continued to join cycling clubs and ride together. The craze helped lead to dress reform, with wheelwomen donning bloomers and divided skirts rather than traditional cumbersome skirts for the occasion.

Between the 1840s and 1880s, women met at the braiding table at home to transform hair into brooches, bracelets, framed pieces of art, and more. While it did sometimes serve as mourning jewelry, friends such as schoolmates and relatives also shared their hair when they married or moved away. So yes, giving your best friend a lock of your hair could actually be sentimental rather than creepy. Craft books from the period detail this technique and show its many uses and patterns.

Women played tennis in full corsets and long skirts! In 1874, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented lawn tennis, which quickly eclipsed croquet as the rage of the hour. By 1884, Wimbledon held its first women’s singles championship, by which time women’s doubles and mixed events were popular on private estates and in suburban clubs.

In his book Glaucus, published in 1855, clergyman Charles Kingsley gave a name to one of Victorian Britain’s strangest hobbies: “Pteridomania,” or fern madness. Women organized excursions to find rare specimens in the British countryside, which were pressed into albums or grown under glass in special containers called Wardian cases. Unlike women’s parlor visits, fern collecting was seen as morally elevating, so these excursions could also give women a little more freedom to roam.

Roller-skating rinks offered lighter supervision than even a parlor visit and an opportunity for young women to interact with their peers. The four-wheeled skate, much easier to maneuver, was patented by American James Plimpton in 1863. By the 1870s, a new fad had emerged, and the British magazine Punch called it Rinkomania. Cities were opening lavish indoor rinks, and the craze even included live bands.

Seaweed collecting became a popular pastime from the 1840s through the 1870s, especially as railways made seaside resorts easier to reach. The hobby was popularized by Margaret Gatty’s 1863 guidebook, British Sea-Weeds. Queen Victoria was believed to have a seaweed album when she was a kid, but royal archives contain no record that one ever existed. Instead, archival evidence shows only that she beachcombed with her family in 1846 and later received a seaweed collection as a gift in 1854 — not that she assembled her own album.

Floriography, or the so-called language of flowers, was far from a foolproof system of coded communication. One guidebook declared a yellow rose signified jealousy; another said friendship. During the 1800s, women constructed romantic messages in tussie-mussies, or small bouquets of flowers, but with so many contradictory dictionaries of floral definition, the pastime is best thought of as a fun parlor game of guesses rather than an arcane system understood by all.

The most fashionable women’s sport during the 1840s and 50s was target archery, which was thought of as graceful rather than exhausting. The first Grand National Archery Meeting was held in 1844, and the Grand National Archery Society was formed in 1861. A polite sport, archery allowed men and women to participate on the same grounds with less supervision than many other social activities, and thus, the respectable pastime quietly became a co-ed sport.

Victorian party guests had their own version of recreating famous artwork. From the 1850s to the 1890s, they staged tableaux vivants, or “living pictures,” by donning appropriate costumes and standing still to recreate scenes from paintings, often in carefully planned lighting. Unlike the more risqué poses plastiques performed in commercial music halls, tableaux vivants were considered respectable enough for the parlor. Arranging the tableaux was a popular group activity for guests.

Croquet offered something Victorian social rules didn’t always make easy: plenty of time for men and women to talk. The exertion was limited, and the pauses between turns left ample opportunity for conversation. The game came from Ireland to Britain in the 1850s and became the great lawn fashion of the 1860s, even leading to the formation of the All England Croquet Club in 1868. But tennis soon started to supplant croquet in the late 1870s and 1880s.

Berlin woolwork, which originated in Germany in the early 1800s, became a popular fashion in Britain and America between the 1830s and 1870s. Using hand-colored grids, women could stitch designs with soft merino wool without needing the same level of skill as traditional embroidery. It became a social event for women, who stitched cushions and slippers over tea and conversation rather than in silence.

From the 1850s to the 1890s, women associated with local field clubs netted butterflies, moths, and beetles in meadows. They killed their specimens using chloroform or cyanide jars that would not damage the wings, then pinned and displayed them in glass-topped cabinets at home. This wasn’t catch-and-release.

Families and guests entertained each other by staging amateur theatricals, including dramatic readings, acting charades, and full-fledged productions in the drawing room. Women were often in charge of coordinating theatricals in the home, organizing costumes, memorizing lines, and creating ad hoc sets from whatever objects were available. However, due to the stigma surrounding professional public theater, especially for upper-class women, this outlet was mostly kept inside the home.

Victorian women would share their bound sentiment albums with members of their social circles. Friends would be asked to add watercolors, inscriptions, or poems during their visits, and it was common to share albums and read from one another’s work in drawing rooms. Unlike the commercial celebrity autograph hunt, sentiment albums were personal keepsakes written by friends for friends. Think less celebrity autograph book and more handwritten friendship scrapbook.

New methods of color printing made brightly colored, die-cut paper “scraps” cheap and widely available during the Victorian era. Women collected scraps and poetry along with greeting cards, meeting together to paste them into albums or to use for decoupage on furniture and other objects. Extra duplicates were traded like currency among friends.

American John Goffe Rand patented a collapsible metal paint tube in 1841 that made wet paint much easier to carry around. This innovation allowed women already schooled in watercolor painting to form sketching clubs and carry their supplies outdoors to scenic areas for collaborative landscape painting and art criticism among themselves. While oil painting was considered a messy medium and largely the realm of men, watercolors were seen as a clean and proper pursuit.

In 1885, The Girl’s Own Paper described a reading circle, the “Friends in Council,” organized by the Chiltern Club. From the 1860s to the 1890s, middle-class women increasingly founded private reading societies where they met every other week to discuss literature and papers written by members. Their stated aim was literary rather than political, but the meetings still gave women a structured place to exchange and debate ideas.

From the 1850s to the 1880s, educators taught calisthenics, a non-competitive exercise similar to (but not the same as) modern gymnastics, to groups of women in girls’ academies and private clubs. Using small dumbbells, rings, or light wooden wands, the women performed in sync to piano music. Calisthenics improved posture, strength, and group synchronization; it was more like dance than an athletic endeavor.

A parlor piano was a middle-class status symbol during Queen Victoria’s entire reign, from 1837 to 1901. Victorian middle-class women would often practice waltzes or operatic transcriptions with another woman to perform during evening “at homes,” which were social gatherings held in the drawing room. When two people played the piano simultaneously, often on one keyboard, it was known as a “four-hand” duet. This music was performed for family and guests rather than for compensation.

Photography was still a brand-new technology when botanist Anna Atkins began publishing Photographs of British Algae in 1843. It became the first book illustrated with photographic images. During the carte-de-visite craze of the 1850s and 60s, women collected small photographic portraits that were exchanged like calling cards. Wealthier hobbyists went further and entered the darkroom to make prints or construct photo collages. Kodak’s roll-film camera helped make photography much more accessible after its introduction in 1888.

This content was created with the help of AI.